When Task Completion Backfires

You better be careful. Your motivation to complete a lofty task in the gym very well could lead you astray. Let’s put it this way, I’ve seen many students in my day who have one or two muscle ups who will never get ten. I’ve seen countless students with a couple of double unders who will never get a set of fifty. That is unless they are willing to take a path towards task completion that isn’t a dead end!

Task completion is necessary but not sufficient for movement mastery. 

So, what gives? Am I just being mean? Am I a hater? Of course I’m not rooting against these folks. However, as movers, we all have a choice. Often there are times we can choose short term successes that permanently guarantee the stifling of long term progress. This tradeoff is a concept as old as the human experience. 

Allow me to be less vague and use the double under as an example. The double under is simple. The rope passes under your feet twice in a single jump. Now, accomplishing the task with tall posture, a soft knee bend, elbows tucked, and all of the work being done in the wrist is a strategy that allows for one double under and also a set of one hundred reps or more. Conversely, one can muster a rep by jumping high with bent knees, piking at the hip with flailing arms, too. Hell, they may be able to do a couple in a row. However, this dead end approach won’t allow for a set of twenty, forty, or hundred. Nonetheless, the former approach is often thrown out when reps don’t come right away.

The good news, however, is if you have coaches like those at DEUCE who hold a point of view about training that perceives all movement as a skill, then you can develop skills that transfer from one movement to the next. Skill transfer is the secret key that guarantees that none of your physical exertion is in vain. Rather, it’s all pouring into the same bucket of movement mastery.